Related papers: To differentiate neutron star models by X-ray pola…
Thermal and non-thermal radiation from pulsars carries significant information from surface and would have profound implications on the state of dense matter in compact stars. For the non-thermal radio emission, subpulse drifting phenomena…
It is a pity that the real state of matter in pulsar-like stars is still not determined confidently because of the uncertainty about cold matter at supranuclear density, even 40 years after the discovery of pulsar. Nuclear matter (related…
Members of the family of pulsar-like stars are distinguished by their different manifestations observed, i.e., radio pulsars, accretion-driven X-ray pulsars, X-ray bursts, anomalous X-ray pulsars/soft gamma-ray repeaters, compact center…
The matter inside pulsar-like compact stars could be in a quark-cluster phase since in cold dense matter at a few nuclear densities (2 to 10 times), quarks could be coupled still very strongly and condensate in position space to form quark…
The nature of pulsar-like compact stars is still in controversy although the first pulsar was found more than 40 years ago. Generally speaking, conventional neutron stars and non-mainstream quark stars are two types of models to describe…
As is known, resonant scattering can distort the surface-brightness profiles of clusters of galaxies in X-ray lines. We demonstrate that the scattered line emission should be polarized and possibly detectable with near-future X-ray…
We present a theoretical model for the thermal X-ray emission and cooling of isolated pulsars, assuming that pulsars are solid quark stars. We calculate the heat capacity for such a quark star, and the results show that the residual thermal…
We review the state of the art for measuring the X-ray polarization of neutron stars. We discuss how valuable precision measurements of the degree and position angle of polarization as a function of energy and, where relevant, of pulse…
The study of neutron stars, or more general compact stars, is a topic of central interest in nuclear astrophysics. Furthermore, neutron stars serve as the only physical systems whose properties can be used to infer information on cold and…
New-generation X-ray polarimeters currently under development promise to open a new window in the study of high-energy astrophysical sources. Among them, neutron stars appear particularly suited for polarization measurements. Radiation from…
Since the opacity of a magnetized plasma depends on polarization of radiation, the radiation emergent from atmospheres of neutron stars with strong magnetic fields is expected to be strongly polarized. The degree of linear polarization,…
Two kinds of difficulties have challenged the physics community for many years: (1) knowing nature's building blocks (particle physics) and (2) understanding interacting many-body systems (many-body physics). Both of them exist in the…
X-ray spectra of galaxy clusters are dominated by the thermal emission from the hot intracluster medium. In some cases, besides the thermal component, spectral models require additional components associated, e.g., with resonant scattering…
Observations of thermal radiation from neutron stars allow one to measure the surface temperatures and confront them with cooling scenarios. Detection of gravitationally redshifted spectral lines can yield the mass-to-radius ratio. In the…
X-ray emission is a common feature of all varieties of isolated neutron stars (INS) and, thanks to the advent of sensitive instruments with good spectroscopic, timing, and imaging capabilities, X-ray observations have become an essential…
After a brief introduction to the necessary of quark stars in modelling pulsars, I present a qualitative analysis of the solidification of quark matter with low-temperature but high-density. The reason, that a solid neutron star could not…
The X-ray emission of neutron stars enables a probe of their temperatures, geometries, and magnetospheric properties. The current number of X-ray emitting pulsars is insufficient to rule out observational biases that may arise from poorly…
The state of super-dense matter is essential for us to understand the nature of pulsars, but the non- perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) makes it very difficult for direct calculations of the state of cold matter at realistic baryon…
We study different stages of the neutron star cooling by computing neutron star properties at various temperatures and entropies using an effective chiral model including hadronic and quark degrees of freedom. Macroscopic properties of the…
Polarization is one of the fundamental natures of electromagnetic radiation. The detection of polarization or polarized photons from distant X-ray radiating systems (such as X-ray binaries (XBs), active galactic nuclei (AGN), pulsars, and…